Parenting Memoir

Gloria Norris grew up in the projects of Manchester, New Hampshire, with her parents; her sister, Virginia; and her cat, Sylvester. A snapshot might show a happy young family, but only a dummkopf would buy that. Nine-year-old Gloria is gutsy and wisecracking. Her father, Jimmy, all dazzle and danger, is often on the far side of the law and makes his own rules - which everyone else better follow. Gloria's mom, Shirley, tries not to rock the boat, Virginia unwisely defies Jimmy, and Gloria fashions herself into his sidekick - the son he never had.

A remarkable teenager who went from public assistance to a million dollar net worth shares his story and offers nine key principles to success. Farrah Gray is no ordinary teenager. He wears a suit and tie; he has an office on Wall Street and another one in Los Angeles...and he sold his first business at the age of 14 for more than a million dollars.

In 2015 former England football star Rio Ferdinand suddenly and tragically lost his wife and soul mate, Rebecca, age 34, to cancer. It was a profound shock, and Rio found himself struggling to cope not just with the pain of his grief but also with his new role as both mum and dad to their three young children. Rio's BBC1 documentary Being Mum and Dad touched everyone who watched it and won huge praise for the honesty and bravery he showed in talking about his emotions and experiences.

"There are children who blend well into a new family and for that, I salute you. When the transitioning adults are genuine in the approach of creating a safe and solid atmosphere between all parties, harmony flows. However, for the children who get lost in the midst of adults yearning to fulfill missing pieces without properly investigating whether the intended target is healthy for everyone, stories like mine are birthed." - Otishia E.

Fuelled by methamphetamines and deviant motives, nothing was off limits for James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud. Not even their own children. Living out of a specially rigged minivan (a mobile torture chamber that included ropes, hooks, curling irons, duct tape, etc), this cold-blooded murdering duo kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed young girls from Reno, Nevada, to Sacramento, California.

In speed skating, a hard pivot is an aggressive shift of direction that requires courage, practice, and split-second timing. For Apolo Ohno, the most frightening hard pivot of his life didn’t happen on the ice—but rather, when he had to hang up his skates for good. “After my final Olympics, I felt confused, vulnerable, and adrift without purpose,” he says.

For years, Steve DeWitt was the only never married megachurch pastor in the United States. This put him in proximity to thousands of people, yet he lived his daily life alone. Over some 8,000 days as an adult single, and now eleven years of marriage, Pastor Steve has a unique perspective on solitude and aloneness. Loneliness addresses this pervasive ache from his personal experience and pastoral viewpoint.

After trying for years to emulate her boomer parents’ 40-year and still-going-strong marriage, Sophie realized that maybe the love she was looking for was down a road less traveled. In this bold, graphic memoir, she explores her sexuality, her values, and the versions of love our society accepts and practices.

n this unforgettable meet-cute, Samantha Allen traces her story of self-discovery during gender transition and the life-altering partnership that began with a simple hello in an elevator. Feeling “unfinished” at the liminal age of twenty-six, the author had already accumulated decades of emotional baggage growing up in a Mormon family and living with gender dysphoria. When she met Corey midtransition, she felt even more like an awkward shape-shifter. Now Samantha shares how taking a chance on that fortuitous encounter meant having the courage to be herself.

A woman unexpectedly finds her best self through a sleepy bundle handed over at the airport in this heartfelt and surprising memoir. In Make Me a Mother, acclaimed memoirist Susanne Antonetta adopts an infant from Seoul, South Korea. After meeting their six-month-old son, Jin, at the airport - an incident made memorable when Susanne, so eager to meet her son, is chased down by security - Susanne and her husband learn lessons common to all parents, such as the lack of sleep and the worry and joy of loving a child.

In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, NY newspaper. Burned once, she's eager for love, but as the only "girl" in the newsroom, she's more concerned about finding allies and making friends. When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.

At the young age of three, while I was at school, my mother was murdered by her abusive new boyfriend. What would happen to her five unintentionally abandoned children? The heartbreak of the devastating loss of my mother was just the beginning of a series of tragic events that shaped my childhood. Lost in the chaos of abuse, I was the unseen collateral damage of domestic violence. I was forced to take on the role of the invisible child for self-preservation. I figured you can't hurt what you can't see.

Charismatic, beautiful Sally Flynn was the center of her daughters' imaginations, particularly Laura's. Without warning, life as they knew it changed as paranoid schizophrenia overtook Sally. Whether it was accusing Laura’s father of trying to win her over to the side of Satan, or buying only certain products that were evil-free, glimmers of her mother’s future paranoia grew brighter as Laura’s early years passed. Once her husband left the family and filed for divorce, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest, and the three girls united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother had taught them in order to deflect danger.

Born in Africa to a Nigerian princess, Precious Williams was less than one year old when her mother put an ad in Nursery World: "Pretty Nigerian baby girl needs new home." Precious's mother had flown to London in search of a new life - a life in which there was no space for a daughter. The first response came rom a 60-year-old white woman, Nan, who prided herself for being "color blind." Correspondence were exchanged, no questions asked, and Precious left her mother for Nan's home in rural England.

My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon, begins Shame, the probing story of the 12-year-old girl who will become the author herself and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

Un récit autobiographique aussi acide que lucide d’une étoile montante du stand-up. Un récit événement, qui fait le buzz dans les médias. Un récit de coming-out, et de toutes les hontes qui ont pu entraver l’acceptation de soi.

When a home burglary strips Kim Danielson of heirlooms and other special keepsakes, she loses more than the items themselves. She is also robbed of tangible connections to her history, and physical reminders of loved ones who have died—igniting grief both old and new. Feeling the weight of disappointment for future generations who cannot inherit a piece of her family’s legacy, Kim creates a new and lasting heirloom, one that can never be stolen.

Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at age 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighborhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pajamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario - especially to his wife and three children.

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....

This confessional self-help guide explores the complex emotional truth of what it’s like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. Activist author Marissa LaRocca’s revelatory tale includes her struggle with her secrets, including sexuality, and how she emerged as an outspoken advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.